In Eco-Performance, Art, and Spatial Justice in the US, Courtney B. Ryan traces how urban artists in the US from the 1970s until today contend with environmental domestication and spatial injustice through performance. In theater, art, film, and digital media, the artists featured in this book perform everyday, spatialized micro-acts to contest the mutual containment of urbanites and nonhuman nature. Whether it is plant artist Vaughn Bell going for a city stroll in her personal biosphere, photographer Naima Green photographing Black urbanites in lush New York City parks, guerrilla gardeners launching seed bombs into abandoned city lots, or a satirical tweeter parodying BP’s response to the 2010 Deepwater Horizon oil spill, the subjects in this book challenge deeply engrained Western directives to domesticate nonhuman nature. In examining how urban eco-artists perform alternate ecologies that celebrate the interconnectedness of marginalized human, vegetal, and aquatic life, Ryan suggests that small environmental performances can expose spatial injustice and increase spatial mobility. Bringing a performance perspective to the environmental humanities, this interdisciplinary text offers readers stymied by the global climate crisis a way forward. It will appeal to a wide range of students and academics in performance, media studies, urban geography, and environmental studies.

This timely collection of essays by leading international scholars across religious studies and the environmental humanities advances a lively discussion on materialism in its many forms. While there is little agreement on what ‘materialism’ means, it is evident that there is a resurgence in thinking about matter in more animated and active ways. The volume explores how debates concerning the new materialisms impinge on religious traditions and the extent to which religions, with their material culture and beliefs in the Divine within the material, can make a creative contribution to debates about ecological materialisms. Spanning a broad range of themes, including politics, architecture, hermeneutics, literature and religion, the book brings together a series of discussions on materialism in the context of diverse methodologies and approaches. The volume investigates a range of issues including space and place, hierarchy and relationality, the relationship between nature and society, human and other agencies, and worldviews and cultural values. Drawing on literary and critical theory, and queer, philosophical, theological and social theoretical approaches, this ground-breaking book will make an important contribution to the environmental humanities. It will be a key read for postgraduate students, researchers and scholars in religious studies, cultural anthropology, literary studies, philosophy and environmental studies.

This title documents the burgeoning eco art movement from A to Z, presenting a panorama of artistic responses to environmental concerns, from Ant Farms anti-consumer antics in the 1970s to Marina Zurkows 2007 animation that anticipates the havoc wreaked upon the planet by global warming.

Ecoarts practice is evolving quickly as a practice. While much of it is made by individual artists working alone, artists are increasingly combining into multi-artist collectives, and collaborating with scientists, sustainability professionals, industry or the community to develop artworks with quite far-reaching effects. This book describes an extraordinary range of artistic practices pitched to encourage people to adopt pro-environmental behaviours by provoking, persuading, providing information, creating empathy for nature or by being built into sustainability practices themselves. It brings together 28 contributors who examine different roles of the arts in encouraging pro-environmental behaviour. There is a wide range of practitioners represented here, including visual and performing artists, sustainability professionals, social researchers, environmental educators, research students and academics. The contributors to this book are united in believing that the arts are vital in promoting pro-environmental behavior in the way that they are practiced, but also in the connections they make to ecology, science and Indigenous culture.

There can be no justice that is not spatial. Against a recent tendency to despatialise law, matter, bodies and even space itself, this book insists on spatialising them, arguing that there can be neither law nor justice that are not articulated through and in space. Spatial Justice presents a new theory and a radical application of the material connection between space – in the geographical as well as sociological and philosophical sense – and the law – in the broadest sense that includes written and oral law, but also embodied social and political norms. More specifically, it argues that spatial justice is the struggle of various bodies – human, natural, non-organic, technological – to occupy a certain space at a certain time. Seen in this way, spatial justice is the most radical offspring of the spatial turn, since, as this book demonstrates, spatial justice can be found in the core of most contemporary legal and political issues – issues such as geopolitical conflicts, environmental issues, animality, colonisation, droning, the cyberspace and so on. In order to ague this, the book employs the lawscape, as the tautology between law and space, and the concept of atmosphere in its geological, political, aesthetic, legal and biological dimension. Written by a leading theorist in the area, Spatial Justice: Body, Lawscape, Atmosphere forges a new interdisciplinary understanding of space and law, while offering a fresh approach to current geopolitical, spatiolegal and ecological issues.

Space, Place and Dramatherapy: International Perspectives provides radical, critical and practical insights into the relevance and significance of space and place in dramatherapy practice. Bringing together an international breadth of contributors, the chapters of this book reveal extensive reflections on the many spaces in which dramatherapists and their clients work and offer research implications for those wishing to critically examine their own symbolic or structural spaces in dramatherapy practice. Chapters consider space and place from many angles: ritual and symbolic spaces; transitional and play spaces; educational and interpersonal spaces; and scenographic and architectural spaces. The book examines the impact of space on human (and more-than-human) relationships, dramatherapy practice and processes and mental health, offering new avenues of research and critical enquiry. This volume is the first of its kind to rigorously elucidate the importance of space within the field of dramatherapy and is essential reading for academics, scholars and postgraduate students of dramatherapy as well as practicing dramatherapists and professionals within the wider domains of arts and health.